


Get down with the sickness

by Insecuriosity



Category: Gravity Falls, Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), Beast Wirt, Chronic Illness, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-27 20:05:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15692460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Insecuriosity/pseuds/Insecuriosity
Summary: After returning from the Unknown, Wirt falls ill. It seems as if the rest of his life will be a difficult one - bound to a wheelchair and forced to live on a diet of only beets and roots.Then the Transcendence happens.





	Get down with the sickness

Wirt shouldn’t have blown out the lantern. 

It was weird to look back on something that he’d thought to be only possible way to make things better for everyone, only to know that would doom him.   
He couldn’t have known what would happen. What it could lead to, what it _did_ lead to… but he shouldn’t have taken that chance. 

-

It started out as just a general loss of appetite – he hadn’t been able to eat half his plate on the morning that he and Greg had escaped from the Unknown. He’d chalked it up to stress and the excitement of the night. He’d never been that big of an eater anyway, so it didn’t matter.   
They had all gone home shortly after the doctor had given them an all-clear, and Wirt had slept well – still riding the high of defeating a terrifying creature and finding the way home. 

The next morning, Mom and dad had made French toast to celebrate that everything was okay – and to console Greg on the loss of his Halloween candy. It had all gotten lost in the river they fell into.   
Wirt had not slept well, his hearing was clogged and the scent of French toast was making his head spin. Halfway through his breakfast, Wirt had to stop eating. The sweetness tasted dull and unappetising, and it settled in his stomach with an uncomfortable burning sensation. 

“Maybe you’ve caught a cold from that river.” Mom said. “Best lay back down in bed - I’ll make you some chicken soup…”

Wirt didn’t even think of arguing, tired and wobbly as he felt. He felt as if he could fall asleep the moment that his head touched his pillow, but by the time mom came into his room with a bowl of freshly made chicken soup, he hadn’t even been dozing.   
The soup tasted like nothing, and it slid down his throat as if it had been made with sand instead of fine vegetables and bits of white chicken. He had to stop after just half the bowl, but at least it stayed inside. Oddly enough, the taste of carrot was overwhelming, even though he had only eaten a few stray pieces. Mom tucked him in and took his temperature. 

“…No fever. Probably a stomach bug then.” She said, stroking his hair. “I’ll send Dad to buy some medicine, and we’ll take you to the doctor if it’s not better by tomorrow.”

Wirt smiled and went back to trying to sleep. Only a few hours later, the chicken soup came right back up – undigested and watery. It didn’t smell like it should have. There was no trace of acid in what he’d splattered into the bucket, just soup.

-

Wirt sat in the car as his parents drove to the hospital. It was only two days after he and Greg had escaped the Unknown, and one day after he’d begun to throw up everything he ate.   
Greg was at school, despite having wanted to come along. Mom and Dad didn’t think it was a good idea. 

Wirt had never felt so weak in his life. As the car sped over the road, his body rattled in his seat – he barely had the strength to keep himself upright. He had a large bottle of water in his hands, since it was the only thing discovered thus far that he could keep down without too much trouble.   
Was it normal to lose so much weight in only two days? It couldn’t be. Wirt had seen a reflection of himself in the car windows and he looked like he was emaciated. His cheeks were hollow, his hair was thin and dull, and the dark skin around his eyes made them seem bigger and whiter. 

“Do you want us to be with you when you talk to the doctor?” Dad asked. 

“Yes. Yes please.” Wirt croaked. No matter how much water he drank, his throat felt dry and cracked. He was afraid. The Unknown wasn’t a place anyone knew about – Wirt wouldn’t even have been sure it had happened at all if Greg hadn’t had the exact same experiences – and he was afraid that whatever he had contracted was beyond medicine.   
Unbiddenly his mind went to Lorna. The paleness of her skin and the tired lines around her eyes – a sickness borne not from the body but from something that nobody in the modern world really believed in. 

The car stopped and Wirt struggled with his seatbelt. By the time he had it unclasped, Dad was already at the door offering him a hand.   
Muscles decayed quickly if they weren’t in use, but Wirt had only been lying in bed for a day and already he had a hard time supporting the weight of his own body. Dad helped him to the entrance of the Hospital, where mom was waiting with a wheelchair. 

_It’s just temporary._ Wirt tried to tell himself. _The doctors will find out what’s going on, and they will give me a medicine, and I will be okay again._

And if it was something from the Unknown – some dark lingering curse from the Beast or Lorna’s terrible spirit - …. Well, he would figure something out. He’d gone into the Unknown once, and he could do it again.

-

The tests were inconclusive. The doctors didn’t know what had happened to him, and they didn’t know how to treat it either. 

They had taken samples of pretty much every fluid he had in his body – and they’d found an odd contaminant in all of them. A new type of cancer? An autoimmunity defect? Outside of making it impossible for him to eat, the contaminant was not harming his body – and it was too dangerous to try and fight it with medicine. In the time it had taken for the test results to return, Wirt had emaciated far enough that antibiotics could hurt him more than they could help.   
An allergy test had brought in better news, though only marginally. It hadn’t been a fun test. One of the nurses had injected small drops of potential irritants into the skin of his back. Egg, cheese, red meat, beans, carrot, fruit- …. Almost all of them had turned into a painful and itchy welt – a heavy allergic reaction. 

The only exception was carrots, roots, and beets for some reason. They tasted like wet dirt, but they stayed down. It wasn’t enough to keep Wirt standing. His legs had never been muscular, but after four days of drinking only water and moving as little as possible, they looked more like knobbly sticks than legs. 

“Can he live off of just carrots and beets?” His mom had asked the doctor. 

The answer had not been a clear yes or a clear no. It would keep him from starving, but his life wouldn’t be a healthy one without the nutrients and vitamins from other foods.   
The doctor prescribed a variety of nutrient drinks and smoothies – the kind of food that was usually fed through a tube to people that could not swallow or chew. Just as with anything else, it came back up with a vengeance only moments after he’d eaten it. No stomach bile, no acid – just slightly slimy nutrient slop, warm from having been in his stomach for a few minutes. 

Wirt was hungry. He couldn’t tell what he was hungry for, or even what it should taste like, but in the few minutes of sleep that he managed, he dreamed of how it filled him up like nothing else could. A warmth that spread from his stomach to the very tips of his fingers and ears. A satisfied feeling and a smokey sweet aftertaste on the back of his tongue. 

After waking, he would stare at the ceiling and think. Lorna and the Beast would not leave him alone. The hungering and satisfaction – was that what Lorna had felt whenever she had bitten into the flesh of travellers? Was it what the Beast felt, when someone poured oil inside of his lantern?   
Wirt didn’t know, and he hoped he was just imagining the influence of the Unknown. There was nothing dark and sinister destroying him from the inside out. There was no tree growing in his gut – he was just sick. 

“If there was a tree in you, you would have a hard stomach!” Greg had said, before delivering an uncomfortable poke into Wirt’s stomach. “And you’d be spitting up leaves and twigs! Blegh.”

“This is serious Greg. What if I’m like Lorna?” Wirt said. “What if I just…. start wanting to eat people?” 

“Hm. That sounds pretty serious.” Greg pondered with a hand on his chin. He looked almost nothing like the Greg from the Unknown without his teapot and suspender-pants, but he still acted the same. “We will just have to keep ringing bells and see if one of them makes you listen!”

“I don’t think that’s how it works.” Wirt said. “Also I would rather not do work all of my life just so I can’t eat you.”

“We’ll just do you what you did with Lorna! Dinga linga ding ding! Go away spirit!” Greg clambered onto Wirt’s bed and looked at him. “I think it will be easy to find bells here – the unknown didn’t have a lot of bells, only the bell from Auntie Whispers.” 

“Well, okay. I mean, it’s not like there’s much else we can try-…” Wirt murmured. 

“Wohoo! Great! I will ask mom if we can go buy some bells! I’ll be right back!” Greg dropped back down and Wirt could hear his rapid footsteps trailing from his room back down the stairs. He had donned his teapot again 

-

Three weeks. 

Wirt had read somewhere that the human body could survive two weeks without food. He hadn’t been able to find anything on how long one could survive on just carrots and beets, but he was lasting longer than he felt he should.   
Everything had evened out. Wirt could sleep exactly an hour, eat two carrots and one beet, and drink a liter of water. He still couldn’t move, he was thin enough that he could count all his ribs, the doctors were still looking for what was ailing him – but he finally stopped getting worse. 

It took a few more days before anyone dared to say it out loud – maybe for fear of jinxing it – but Greg was never one to stay silent. 

“I think Wirt’s getting better!” He claimed at the breakfast table one day. “He hasn’t used the bucket for a week! Is the medicine helping?”

“I’m not sure, I think so?” Wirt replied tiredly. Dad had made breakfast for him today – he’d taken it upon himself to try and find as many carrot and beet recipes as he could so Wirt didn’t have to eat the same thing over and over. 

“Good! Then you can finally go to school again! A lot of people have been asking about you, and Sarah handed me a bigg stack of papers for your lessons!”

“Right, yea. I just… I guess I should look at that. I have to be so behind on my homework!” Wirt said. 

“Do you think you’re ready for school honey?” Mom asked. 

Wirt wasn’t sure if he was, but he was ready to be out of the house. Over the last few weeks it had become more and more stifling to be in the same room. Mom and Dad had been doing their best to stay at home should he need urgent care, and he missed his friends at school.   
He didn’t exactly look forward to rolling around the school in a wheelchair, but it was that or just staying at home alone. His parents wouldn’t be able to keep taking vacation days.

“I think so, yea.” He replied. “Um. Might not get the best grades, but I want to get back into the swing of things you know? Try and get everything back to normal.”

Wirt wasn’t sure he could go back to normal. Not when evidence was mounting towards a mystical kind of illness, as opposed to a real one.   
The latest tests had taken more samples of the contaminant that had spread across his body. It wasn’t something that the human body normally produced, and according to the doctors it resembled mucus the closest. When taken from the body it would solidify into a squishy, slightly tacky dark glob. 

It smelled like an autumn forest after a lighteningstorm. The soft undertone of wet plant, underbush, rotten leaves, combined with the cloying thickness of burnt bark and wood. 

Wirt could never forget how Edelwood oil smelled. 

-

Going back to school helped. 

It didn’t cure what was wrong with him, not did it help him sleep or eat, but it gave him something to _do_. Wild ideas and memories of the Unknown seemed farther away when he was at school – rolling through the hallways on his automated wheelchair, or talking with a friend who had agreed to push him.   
There was a lot of work to catch up on, and even if Wirt didn’t have the same amount of energy as he used to, he had double the time of his fellow students. 

People were interested in what he was going through. Not everyone was nice. Not everyone knew how to ask questions without being rude and jabbing sore spots, but they tried. He no longer had to participate in gym class, which was a godsent, and on his first day back at school he received a care-package from the people he shared classes with.   
It was a godsent to be able to share some of his worries and experiences with his friends, and not just Mom and Dad. They never told him and did their best to hide it, but every mention of his stomach getting sicker and his body feeling weaker was like a punch to the gut for them. With his friends, he could joke about it – and share any bad news with just one person at a time. They didn’t have to see his worst moments. He stayed home on bad days. 

Going back to school also made it easier to toss away the remnants of his beet and carrot lunch when it became too much for him to eat. 

-

Wirt became good at figuring out the extent of his energy. It had been a few months since he’d come back from the Unknown, but it already felt like it had been ages. His life had changed drastically in only a few months, but the changes had finally stopped. 

A small rash sometimes popped up in his armpits and his inner knee, but it was not harmful and often went away on its own. He still didn’t sleep well, but he’d found that it was easier to sink away in a drowsy dream-state when he sat in his wheelchair near a window. He had moved rooms from upstairs to downstairs so it was a little easier to get around, and his room looked out over their backyard.   
It helped him calm down to have a view of nature so close by in the evenings – even if he focused on schoolwork or poetry. More often than not, there was enough light from the moon and stars that he didn’t need to turn on his lights. 

He knew when to call out his limits. He ate as much of the carrot and beet mixtures as he could, always carrying a Tupperware box of it with him should the gnawing hunger become too much.   
He stopped thinking on the how and why. Not because he wasn’t interested anymore, but because there were no answers to be found, and because thinking about it brought back things he didn’t want to be thinking of. Nightmares of the Beast – Greg sinking into the ground, solidifying into wood and oil. 

Wirt had no idea how long he would last this way. He was barely to his mid-teens, and already there were pains in his joints and bones, wear and tear in a body that should have lasted many more years. 

He was living on borrowed time. 

-

One month stretches into two months, and two months stretch into four. 

Wirt’s health doesn’t improve, but neither does it plummet. There’s still the occasional check up in the Hospital – worried glances shared over test results and every important nutritional value dropping more and more with the pace of a limping snail – but in day to day life… Wirt was okay. 

Slowly but surely, they all adapt to this new reality. Wirt’s friends learn how to push his wheelchair without jarring starts and stops. Mom and dad collect recipes for his system, and they stop taking days off work when Wirt so much as coughs. Financial problems are solved, and they stay solved.   
Greg learns to play new games with Wirt that don’t involve as much running, pushing, and pulling, and Wirt takes his weakened state as a sign to get more out of life. 

He goes to see a therapist every week to help – he was never the most positive person out there, and even though he wants to be happy and make the most out of life, there’s days where all the fears come rushing back. 

For how long it may last, life is alright. 

-

Eight months since Greg and Wirt escaped the Unknown. It was summer and the grass has long since given up on trying to stay green. The sky was bright blue, with only a few lonesome spots of cloud drifting along, and the schools closed only about a week ago.   
Many of Wirt’s friends have gone to different places. Summer camps, road trips, flight-vacations to Europe, Hawaii, or Japan…. Normally Wirt and Greg would be somewhere else as well, but there’s barely anything for people in a Wheelchair, and medical expenses left the vacation-funds a little lean. 

Wirt was sitting in the backyard, his wheelchair parked under a parasol that tinted everything around him a glowing orange, watching Greg playing in the grass with several containers of water and a kiddie pool, when something changed.  
It wasn’t a change of anything physical. The air still smelled of heated stone and wet grass, the wind still blew softly through the hot atmosphere, and the clouds drifted lazily on by, and yet Wirt felt that something had squeezed its way into the world. Something that shouldn’t be here. Something twisted and dark, and dangerous. 

“What’s wrong Wirt?” Greg asked. After their adventure in the Unknown, Greg had become more aware of his surroundings. Wirt was sure that mom appreciated not having to buy as many bandages for scraped knees and elbows, but it had been harder to keep the farce of Santa going. 

“Nothing.” He replied quickly. Greg hummed, but before he could back to his game, Wirt continued. “Actually - … do you feel like something has changed?”

“Yes! You noticed it too! My stomach is hungry for a snack!” Greg said, and he plapped a hand on his belly. 

“No not that.” Wirt said. “I mean, do you think something has changed in an … Unknown kind of way?”

Greg paused a little longer this time and he made a show of thinking it over, his forehead scrunching up with wrinkles as he thought. “Hmmmmmm…… nope! Just a normal day!”

“Oh.”

Wirt could _still_ feel it. Like a pebble in his shoe- only further away. Like he was watching his neighour who had the pebble in his shoe, but he could still feel it? And if it wasn’t removed, it would grow bigger and bigger, until the pebble crushed the foot, and burst the shoe open.   
He shook his head and tried to ban the unsettling image from his mind. It didn’t help to linger on what-ifs and doomsday scenario’s. If it had something to do with him, then…. Then he’d deal with it as it came. 

“Let’s go inside for your snack. I think I’m hungry for some more beet juice.” Wirt said. He wasn’t hungry for anything but a distraction, and a big pitcher full of bland mush would have to suffice. 

“Yay! Kool Aid! Kool Aid!” Greg cheered. 

The feeling of unease lingered. 

-

When the Transcendance happened, Wirt was the first to feel it. 

He had been sitting in the living room, legs tucked under a blanket despite the summer warmth outside, watching a documentary.   
The uneasy presence that he’d felt entering the world only a few weeks back suddenly popped – like a balloon that had been inflated beyond its stretch – and Wirt almost jolted out of his wheelchair when the shockwave hit him. He must have made a sound as well, because Mom and Greg were immediately with him – trying to ask him questions. 

Wirt couldn’t hear them. His body was so tense that he could barely move, and his skin was breaking – peeling away from his flesh like rubbery strips of paint. Watery and sticky blood was sticking to his clothes and wheelchair, and it smelled of sickly edelwood. It smelled like the branches that he had snapped off of Greg after he had blown out the lantern – young and _hungry_.  
Bones and branches, Oil and blood – they were indistinguishable from each other as the waves of unleashed energy slammed into Writ, forcing him to change shape or wither away. 

Mom stopped talking but Wirt could feel her iron grip around his wrist. Greg was yelling encouragements at Wirt and threats at the Beast – tiny fingers trying to rip the growing bark off of him. It felt like he was tugging on Wirt’s skin.   
“Wirt! I’m saving you!” He yelled. Wirt wished he would stop. 

Something was choking him – stuck in his chest and compressing his lungs into nothing – burning at his insides.  
He was burning, even as his muscles stiffen and hardened, cracking and knotting like dark red wood, bleeding black tree sap. His clothes were sloughing off of him as if they no longer had a grip on his skin, and Mom screamed. Wirt could feel the familiar shape and cut of his Halloween clothes take shape underneath. They stank of bog, of mud, of long-rotten water and pine sap. They were made of leather and bits of fur – parts of a sack used by farmers to carry grain. 

His head split – cracked – broke open, and his brains grew out. Huge strands of red pink flesh twisted and grew up into the air. They were as hard as antlers. Wirt could feel it when their tips knocked into the sofa that he had been sitting in front of. 

The burning in his chest was unbearable, and as soon as his arms began to respond to him he began to scratch at his chest, digging at the thing that was burning him alive from the inside. He’d come to stand, and there were things falling as he fought with his own body.   
Greg was no longer trying to pull away the bark – Mom was holding him back at a distance, the taste of her fear strong enough that Wirt could sense it. 

He dug into his body, hard fingers slipping in sticky brownish sap, and finally his fingers found the burning object that had been lodged deep in him. He curled his hand around the handle and pulled it out – throwing it into a far corner and _feeling_ it hit the wall rather than hearing it.   
He collapsed back into his wheelchair. There was frightened breathing in the room with him, but he knew they were not only frightened of him. There was something in the air- like a blanket of suffocating snow drifting down. The waves were still coming, peeling away the layers of reality until everything was laid bare. 

When he opened his eyes again, his skin was as dark as the void – sucking in any light that fell on and around him. The weakness he had become so used to was still there, but when he peeled his hand loose from the deathgrip on his wheelchair, the plastic casing had been shattered into pieces, and there were dents in the metal underneath. 

“Wirt…?” Greg sounded far away, and hesitant. He sounded a little like when he’d been admitted to stealing the rock facts rock – like he was sick. 

Wirt couldn’t focus on him. Not when he could taste the scent of edelwood oil in his mouth and could see the lantern of the Beast leaning against the wall. It was lit, with its door firmly closed around a warm light. 

Just by looking at it, Wirt knew that it was his own soul inside. He could feel his yawning hunger more than ever, and he watched as the flame inside of the lantern flickered with famine. 

It barely took him a second to stand up and head towards it, sneaking his fingers towards the handle. The light coming from the inside was burning hot and Wirt knew he couldn’t touch the metal. The wood around the handle was all he could touch – a piece of edelwood so old that there was not a spot of oil in it.  
He wanted nothing more than to hold it close and protect it. It was so vulnerable – so weak and exposed in that thin little cage of metal and glass! Yet, holding it at an arm’s length was already pushing the limit of what he could handle – it was so warm that it felt like it was peeling his skin off. 

“Wirt.”

He remembered the way the Beast had recoiled from the light inside of the lantern and the countless times it had crept closer as if mesmerised. That same obsession stirred in him now – the slowly coiling flames inside of the lantern beckoning him closer and closer but keeping him at bay with pain.   
He can sense other things too. Slumbering roots under the ground, panicked footsteps between the trees, claws and paws digging into the dirt of his doman - …. So many wanderers. People who are lost – trailing crumbs of their past lives as they dash through the forest. 

“WIRRT!” There was a harsh yank on the right side of Wirt’s head as Greg grabbed a hold of one of his antlers, and they both crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs.

“Greg! Ow!” Wirt yelped despite himself. He’d almost forgotten how ruthless one of Greg’s pounces could be if he felt like he wasn’t being listened to. His voice had gotten a little deeper, but most of all he sounded hushed and dry – like he hadn’t had a cup of water for years upon years. 

“Are you awake again?” Greg asked. “You were reeeally distracted, and you look-… weird.”

“Honey?” Mom sounded frightened, but she kneeled close to him despite her trepidation. 

Wirt ignored them and hurried to the window. Outside, very familiar and dark trees were starting to bubble up from the ground. A stream of muddy water seemed determined to cut through the house at the other end of the street, and people were spilling outside.   
Some of them had fangs and claws where they had been normal before, and others were white as a sheet, holding a frying pan to try and ward off the odd creatures that were popping up from seemingly everywhere. All of them were moving away from the forest that was growing around the street and homes – Wirt could feel how his power was driving them away from what was rightfully his. 

“I know he looks like the Beast, but he’s Wirt, so it’s okay.” Greg said. He was trying to console Mom. “Though I’m not sure how we’re supposed to keep the lantern lit without making people into trees. Do you have any idea Wirt?”

“What?” Mom said weakly. She was looking at something that was flying low through the city – a griffon. 

Everything that knew what had happened was running away. They could tell – instinctually or otherwise – that Wirt’s domain was one where you had better not be if you were lost, mentally or physically.   
Or maybe they could smell his hunger. It was overwhelming, and finally Wirt knew what he needed to fill that gnawing ache. 

“I need to go.” He said – more to himself than to the other two people with him. They were not lost – not enough to serve as fuel for the lantern – but at the centre of his forest where the trees had grown the biggest and fastest there were confused souls wandering in an unsure pattern.   
Most of them were animals. Their fright and confusion would soon become acceptance and they would soon carve out their own place in his realm, but there were humans there too. Large souls, complicated motives and emotions – so much to be condensed! 

“Where are you going?” 

He didn’t reply. There was too much hunger and now that he knew how to silence it, he wasn’t going to stop himself.

**Author's Note:**

> I've always loved the Transcendance AU and the Beast!Wirt AU, but I was never quite able to make something I was happy with. This is probably the best I will do for a while, and I hope you have enjoyed it! 
> 
> Also forgive the title - I couldn't think of anything better on the fly.


End file.
